Use Timewarp

Timewarp is a paid feature that schedules email campaigns based on each individual subscriber's time zone, so subscribers receive your scheduled campaigns at the correct time for them. For example, If you send from New York and schedule delivery for 9am, your west coast subscribers would normally get the email at 6am PST. Timewarp would delay sending to anyone until it's 9am in their time zone.

Depending on your plan, you may not have access to Timewarp. To find out what features are included in each plan, check out our pricing page.

In this article, you'll learn how Timewarp works, how to send an email campaign with Timewarp, and how we determine subscriber location.

How Timewarp Works

Behind the scenes, Timewarp uses Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). When you send a Timewarp email campaign, we start to send when the first time zone in the world, UTC +14, reaches your scheduled time. Each hour, we batch campaigns by time zone and send to subscribers in each area, moving west around the world.

Since some time zones are ahead of yours, you'll need to plan Timewarp campaigns at least 24 hours in advance.

Example

You send your email campaigns from an office in New York City, Eastern Standard Time (UTC -5), and you want your subscribers to receive your campaign at 10am Tuesday. At 10am EST Tuesday, it's already 8:30pm in Mumbai, and 4am Wednesday in New Zealand. If you wait to build that campaign Tuesday morning, it will already be later than that in most of the world and those subscribers wouldn't receive the campaign.

To ensure that no zones miss their scheduled time, set up your Timewarp email campaigns at least 24 hours before you want it to go out in your time zone.

How We Determine Subscriber Location

A subscriber's IP address can determine their geographical location. We use geolocation to collect IP addresses from Mailchimp-hosted signup forms, email campaign opens, and clicks. As a subscriber continues to interact with your campaigns, the location or IP address may change. If a subscriber didn't use a hosted signup form or hasn't opened a few email campaigns yet, we won't have location data for them.

Send an Email Campaign with Timewarp

In the Schedule Your Campaign pop-up modal, click the Delivery date calendar picker to choose the day you want to send your campaign.

Click the Send with Timewarp radio button.

Use the drop-down menus to choose the time you want your subscribers to receive the campaign. The selected date and time must be at least 24 hours from your current time.

Click Schedule Campaign.

Note

Timewarp is only available for regular and plain-text email campaigns. Premium accounts or accounts with Mailchimp Pro also have the option to use Timewarp to send emails in their automations. It's not available for RSS or A/B Testing Campaigns.

Why? RSS Campaigns can be sent daily, weekly, or monthly based on when items are posted. If the feed gets a new post before the last RSS campaign was completed, Timewarp would stop sending the first campaign to begin the new one, so some subscribers would get more campaigns than others. A/B Testing Campaigns are designed to test one variable at a time, and Timewarp adds an additional variable that could skew the results of your test.

If a Timewarp campaign is set to auto-post to Facebook or Twitter, we'll post the email campaign at the same time that the first batch of Timewarp emails is sent.

Don't forget that time zones can vary within lines of longitude and aren't straight. To better understand how time zones are laid out, take a look at timeanddate.com, which provides a chart of multiple countries, cities, and their time zones.

Technical Support

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